The Gadget Show Live: LG Arena – not just another iPhone wannabe [video]

I’ve got to hand it to the guy from LG’s stand at The Gadget Show Live, if it wasn’t for his genuinely enthusiastic pitch for the company’s new ‘Arena’ KM900 touch screen phone, I might too easily have dismissed it as just the latest iPhone wannabe. He talked up the Arena’s 3 inch WVGA (480 x 800) screen, 8GB of on-board storage (expandable to 40GB via MicroSD), “S-Class” User Interface, and FM transmitter functionality – a feature that I recently suggested all portable media players should carry. Having said that, the Arena does take a number of design cues from the iPhone; the industrial design and the UI’s art work borrows more than a little from Apple’s iconic device.

Admittedly, the Arena does have some UI ideas of its own, which are potential improvements – my iPhone-touting designer buddy certainly thought so – such as the 3D cube effect when switching application screens, and the ability to view a grid of 32 icons (up from 16) when accessing the launcher in landscape mode. The camera also beats the iPhone – 5 megapixels and 30 frames-per-second video recording – although there’s strangely no flash (Update: there is a single LED flash). The inclusion of Dolby Mobile should also ensure excellent sound quality when listening through ear buds. Again, I hope to source a loan unit soon for a full hands-on review.

last100 is edited by Steve O'Hear. Aside from founding last100, Steve is co-founder and CEO of Beepl and a freelance journalist who has written for numerous publications, including TechCrunch, The Guardian, ZDNet, ReadWriteWeb and Macworld, and also wrote and directed the Silicon Valley documentary, In Search of the Valley. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.

I got my LG Arena, still getting to grips with it; creating menu short cuts and fiddling with the ring tones and things but it’s the email that I find the most tricky to sort out. It can be a pain in the neck to set up, in my humble opinion, and always takes the longest of all the features in your phone to organise.

If you’re looking for some tips on how to sync up your email accounts on your KM900, check out http://www.LG-Arena.org They’ve got an all-encompassing, how-to on the subject.

You’ll be able to have your server and web based email trussed up in their relative accounts in no time.